Ten new binary black hole mergers in the O3a observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo

We report the detection of ten new binary black hole merger signals in the publicly released data from the the first half of the third observing run of advanced LIGO and advanced Virgo (O3a). The mergers were discovered using an updated version of the search pipeline described in Venumadhav et al. (Phys. Rev. D101, 083030 (2020), arXiv:1904.07214), and are selected according to criteria similar to those in LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC) pipeline. The updated search is sensitive to a larger region of parameter space, applies a parameter prior that accounts for different search volume as a function of intrinsic parameters, and uses a new detection statistic that checks for consistency of signals between the Hanford and Livingston detectors. The parameter inference incorporates data from the Virgo detector. We also confirm and raise the significance of the majority of the events reported in the LVC catalog for O3a (GWTC-2.1). Among our ten new events, we observe interesting astrophysical scenarios including possible neutron star black hole (NSBH) mergers at both extreme and near-unity mass ratio, events with confidently large effective spin parameters in both the positive (aligned) and negative (anti-aligned) directions, and a possible intermediate mass black hole (IMBH) merger with a stellar mass companion.